In The Chrysalids John Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community were the chances of breeding true are less than 50 percent, and were deviations are rooted out and destroyed as offences and abominations. The narrator of the Chrysalids is David, who can communicate with a small group of other young people by means of "thought shapes". This deviation from a cruelly rigid norm goes unnoticed at first. But sooner or later the secret is bound to be discovered and the results are violent, horrific . . . and believable. (The Chrysalids, back cover)